Research

I am working on a project called ‘Long-term in-home EEG monitoring in epilepsy’. This project is part of the High Tech Health Farm project and involves the development and evaluation of a device for in-home brain monitoring in the diagnostic process of epilepsy. Conventionally, a patient that experienced a seizure visits a neurologist, after which an EEG is recorded for 20-30 minutes by a lab-technician. Such a routine EEG has relatively low sensitivity in epilepsy, ranging between 25-56%. This low sensitivity typically results in additional EEG recordings, often after sleep deprivation to evoke epileptiform activity in the EEG, which requires an additional visit to the hospital for the recording procedure, and a third visit to the treating neurologist. This “routine procedure” results in a sensitivity of approximately 70-80% and is relatively time-consuming (over a period of several weeks), both for the patient and the treating physician. Furthermore, misclassification is still common, ranging from 5-23%. The main reason for the limited sensitivity of the standard diagnostic strategy is the relatively short recording time, as in many patients with epilepsy 20-30 min. EEG recordings do not show any abnormality. As an alternative, we propose routine long-term (48-72h) EEG recordings for patients evaluated for epilepsy.